A new way to browse the news...
 

My boss just sent this to me. Neat.

10x10

It's News Sudoku!

I'm amused that the headlines have been reduced to a single word: Iraq - Comment - Report - Murder - Interview

Just a quick scan of the images and words, and I'm all up to date in about fourteen seconds!

Eh, if it is going to do that I'd rather it just present the headlines rather than that picture grid. The grid offers no information and many of the words are irrelevant to the stories or so vague to be meaningless (currently such as "major" and "island").

I'm also curious about the "complex linguistic analysis" done to weight words since it seems to give some weight to words that don't exist in the story itself. For example the aforementioned "island" has four links, the word island appears in only one of the articles and not in a way central to the story.

The photo story matching has some issues, caused, I'm sure by the fact that most filed news stories don't actually have an image attached. So there is a lot of duplication (at the moment 4 Putins and 4 Shell signs) and frequently the photo doesn't have anything to do with the word (currently "arrests" has a picture of Tony Blair; in that story about Blair the word arrest does appear, but of course there is no chance of Blair being arrested).

So while this is a format that I don't think would ever be appealing to me for browsing the news (since useful information is pushed back one level from me) but currently they aren't doing half as good as Google News (which is also automated) at categorization of the news.

I like moving my mouse up and down to make the words dance.